Linguistics

The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose is a 1.5 million word electronic corpus of Old English prose texts which is annotated with the grammatical information necessary for extensive linguistic analysis. The corpus can be searched automatically for abstract grammatical structures (such as relative clauses, subject-verb inversion, expletive subjects, etc.), as well as (strings of) words, allowing quick and easy access to the data necessary to investigate virtually any aspect of the language of the period.

The Historical Thesaurus of English is the first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world's languages. It includes almost the entire recorded vocabulary of English from Old English to the modern period, taken from the Oxford English Dictionary and dictionaries of Old English. The distinctive, semantically-structured hierarchy of the HTE data allows scholars access to material in a uniquely flexible manner, making it an invaluable resource to historians and linguists in particular.

The research objective is to read or reconstruct the Arabic documents found at the harbour town of Quseir on the Egyptian Red Sea coast during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods (13th-15th centuries)
ie:
a) to evaluate the texts combined with archeological enquiry;
b) to examine the content and context within the framework of the long distance trade and pilgrim traffic from Quesir as a chief port of the Red Sea region and its trade contacts with the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.

The initial feasibility study 'Chinese Texts in Electronic Form for Linguistic Analysis' was based on a limited number of Chinese text samples from the Song (960-1279), Ming (1366-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties: a formal prose in the Southern-Song period; a martial arts fiction in the Ming Dynasty; and a general fiction in the Qing Dynasty.